Community perceptions of a rural medical school: a pilot qualitative study.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This paper explores local community perceptions of a relatively new rural medical school. For the purposes of this paper, community engagement is conceptualized as involvement in planning, delivering, and evaluating the medical program. Although there are several reviews of patient involvement in medical curricula development, this study was designed to pilot an approach to exploring the perspectives of well members of the community in the transition of institutional policy on community engagement to one medical school. METHODS: An advertisement in the local newspaper invited volunteers to participate in a telephone interview about the new medical school. An independent researche..